Katie Wells, MD, MPH

Dr. Katie Wells is the University of Vermont (UVM) Emergency Department Network Director of International Emergency Medicine and Health Equity. She is also the inaugural UVM Larner College of Medicine Director of Social Medicine. Over the last five years, Dr. Wells has built the UVM International Emergency Medicine program from the ground up, having been awarded multiple grants focused on building critical access to healthcare for Vermont’s immigrant and refugee communities. She completed her Global Health Fellowship with the University of Utah Center for Global Surgery, where she researched trauma, emergency, and surgical system development. Dr. Wells received her Master’s in Public Health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She spent two years working in Mongolia, focusing on surgical, emergency, and trauma system development while conducting research with the Mongolian Ministry of Health and the national hospital system. During her fellowship, she completed her MPH with a focus on disaster medicine and refugee health. Dr. Wells also focuses on building curriculum and researching health equity and social justice while overseeing trainee involvement in social medicine programs.

Since joining Vermont, Dr. Wells and her team have built partnerships, working alongside multiple international partners and organizations focused on expanding international emergency care system development. UVM Department of Emergency Medicine has supported the development of the first Ugandan curriculum for emergency care nursing for the country, developed an International Rural Emergency Care Systems (IRECS) rotation built for practitioners working in the international context, which was piloted this year with Ugandan partners including SEED Global Health, and two Ugandan residency training programs at Makerere and Mbarara University of Science and Technology with the plan to expand this for all international partners. Additionally, Wells partnered with AFEM and South African partners, Stellenbosch University and the University of Cape Town, to explore equitable GH partnerships and built UVM’s first institutional multidisciplinary Global Health Equity fellowship starting July 2024, amongst many other initiatives. Wells has also developed the first UVM institutional collaborative immigrant health program called the Immigrant Health Initiative (IHI), bringing in members of over 20 different University of Vermont Health Network departments and over 50 community partners and created the first salary-funded hospital network immigrant community liaison position held explicitly by a member of Vermont’s refugee community. Dr. Wells is working collaboratively with community and medical center partners to change statewide policy focused on immigrant health.